Tuesday, May 29, 2012

5 Green and Speckled Frogs!

Of course we started our frog theme out by singing 5 Green and Speckled Frogs. It's very much a favorite and easy to learn.

I chose to use number frogs from SparkleBox. This was perfect for the toddler in the group, though they all enjoyed it. Construction paper logs, laminated frogs, and blue foam pond. (After these last few days of doing this song T. can name 3 out of 5 of the numbers and can point to all of them when asked where a specific number is. He also has come quite a ways in ordering the 5 all on his own each time!)

We also looked at pictures of frogs and found out that not all frogs are green and speckled! :-) We learned that some frogs, like the red eyed tree frog in the picture on the right has bright colors and bright colors usually means "Watch out! I'm poisonous!" A site to get you started on kid friendly photos and facts is Kid Zone.

We pulled out our Animal Habitats game again, the picture was when we did the farm/zoo animal venn diagram back in February. And figured that even though there wasn't a frog on every mat, there could be. Frogs are found all over the world, except in the Artic, Antarctica and Greenland. And they can be found near any (actually, near every) fresh body of water. They prefer ponds and marshes because the water doesn't move as quickly. :-)

Children created their own frog habitat picture and frog to go with it. We chose to just use the frog pattern that was on the same page as our life cycle (The Mailbox) to save paper. Oil pastels and tempera water cakes were our choice of media for this project.

This from a Mailbox Publication (TEC #845). Children cut out the life cycle circle and trace that circle onto green paper and cut that out as well. Tracing and cutting are definitely something they will do quite a bit of in most Kindergarten classrooms so I want them to experience holding a pattern and tracing it. The flower was just made with oil pastels. Did you know that a female frog lays up to 4000 eggs at a time? Wow! This is also where I slipped in the fact that Frogs are amphibians. Amphibian means "2 lives". The frog begins as eggs/tadpoles/froglets in the water but when they are full grown they live on land.

Counting Frogs Clothespins

Making Learning FunMany of their counting strips have items that are randomly placed on the strip vs. ordered left to right and top to bottom. :-) This makes it a nice challenge for older children but quite difficult for younger children so I provide a dry erase marker to use on the laminated strips so they can mark off the flies as they count them. Then they know what they have counted and what they haven't.

Water Play with Frogs and Lily Pads

These frogs are from Dollar Tree. I simply created circles from green foam and snipped a triangle out of the side.

Frog Jumping

The Dollar Tree has a nice teacher's section. Often I can find theme related bulletin board strips. Unfortunately I don't really have bulletin board space here at home, like I did in center-based programs, but we use them for other activities. :-) Here the child put their frog on a number and we rolled the dice and jumped forward and backwards. This was to reinforce the +, -, = signs.

Blurry picture but I wanted to have on record T.'s 1:1 correspondence here during free play time.

Consider the free Frog Frolics pack from Homeschool Share! Lots of goodies there that we are incorporating into our days. Rhyming with Frog, Prey/Predator, Frog Maze are three we've done so far and there are quite a few more that we plan to do over the next couple of days.

Frog Maze

This time I chose to have them place mancala beads on the flowers instead of using dry erase marker. Just tweaking it a bit to keep interest and incorporating that pinching/two finger pick up motion. The kids always enjoy working with mancala beads. :-)

Camouflaged Frogs

Yep, can't even see the frogs in there. :-D A side note, I think the favorite sensory material over the last 6 years has been a dried bean mixture. There is just something about this mixture that they don't get tired of!

Frog Egg Sensory

Deborah from Teach Preschool recently posted about water beads and they are a favorite here also. So in that post, she mentioned using them with shaving cream. Oh! We hadn't done that yet so I decided to do that today and it worked out perfectly. One child said, "Look, frog eggs!" So our conversation went off from there. Neat! Wasn't even planned. From awhile back we had rainbow water beads, however, sitting over time caused them to turn that brownish purplish color...worked out nicely for our "frog eggs". :-P

Frog Color Words

We started out with K. reading a very old Weekly Reader about Frogs and their colors. Perfect sight word practice for her and since it's been an odd couple of weeks and our frog activities are being spread out, it was a good review of the frog life cycle.

Then K. worked on the clothespin color word match from Making Learning Fun and H. and T. worked together with me using the other frog color match. For whatever reason, I can't find this match in any of the logical places it would be on my computers, nor can I find it in a several of the searches I did on the internet. So, I'll keep looking as it's a very nice activity for toddlers and young preschoolers to introduce the color words. If you know the link to this color/frog-lily pad matching activities...please leave a comment! For some reason I was thinking it was from a homeschooling mom. Thanks!

Froggy Painting

Every once in awhile I like to do a step by step painting/drawing project. It brings their attention to the shapes in making a picture and helps with their idea that they "can't draw". Below is a close up of one of them to show our "flies". :-) Black beans and white crayon wings. They enjoyed this simple project.

Tally Marks

This was very well liked. I had one child place the foam lily pads around the living room and another child went around and put a frog on each lily pad. Then each child was given a handful of craft sticks. They flipped the lily pad over to see the number, stated it and then created that number with tally marks. We use the Tally Mark Poem that goes like this...1, 2, 3, 4Number 5 shuts the door.6, 7, 8, 9Number 10 makes the line.

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We're on a new adventure! Schooling at home...and homeschooling, for the time being. :-) This blog is a great way for me to keep track of some of our happenings that are worth remembering! Then it also provides the families I am working with and anyone else who might be interested, a sneak peak of what's going on.